Credits Safiya U. Noble is an associate professor at UCLA, co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and a faculty advisor to the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. She is the author o

Katastophennachrichten über das Klima folgen immer schneller aufeinander (Tharoor ) . Die Waldbrände in Sibirien, aber auch die Hitze hier in Europa sind Signale dafür, dass wir inzwischen auf dem ste

Christian Jarrett is a senior editor at Aeon+Psyche, with particular responsibility for writing and commissioning at Psyche. A cognitive neuroscientist by training, his books include The Rough Guide t

In 1957, a man from New York named R. Gordon Wasson published an article in Life about two trips he had taken, three decades apart. The first was to the Catskills, in New York, where his wife, Valentina, took a rambling walk in the woods and became enamored of some wild mushrooms. “She caressed the…

By now we are all extremely familiar with the litany of challenges we face as a global species, the threats of scarcity which pit state against state and community against community, problems manmade and visible in nature: growing population, increasing urbanization, deforestation, damaged…

W hen Peter Kozmus stepped off his plane from New York at Ljubljana airport in Slovenia in 2017, he expected to quietly grab his suitcase at the baggage carousel and make his way home. Instead, when h

F rom the lush green hill you can see Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia , in the distance. Populations of deer, rabbits and turtles live here. The air is clean and the only signs that we are standing

The Royal Palace Amsterdam, which is closed to the public until further notice because of the coronavirus crisis.Photograph: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images A doughnut cooked up in Oxford will guide Amsterdam out of the economic mess left by the coronavirus pandemic. While straining to keep…

The Burnout List January 8, 2020 I am a man who knows burnout. Last summer, I found myself in the deepest work-related hole I’ve experienced. I spent some time (with help) looking at what parts of my burnout were on me and what parts were outside of my control—the elements of my fatigue that were,…

Recently, a long-term client of mine sent me an email with the question below (scrubbed for anonymity) after we’d spent close to a year together building a set of objectives and key results (OKRs) for the entire organization along with, what I believed to be, a clear sense of how to at least start…

First, three high-level observations: I. Over my last three analyses, several trend themes continue to thrive: Environmental Concerns, Prioritized Mental Wellness, Evolving Identity Boundaries , and A Physical-Virtual Blur . For three years straight, these remain the most ubiquitous subjects. Most…

Over the past decade “freemium”—a combination of “free” and “premium”—has become the dominant business model among internet start-ups and smartphone app developers. Users get basic features at no cost and can access richer functionality for a subscription fee. If you’ve networked on LinkedIn, shared…

Scandinavians have it all. Universal public healthcare and education that is the envy of the world. Reasonable working hours with plenty of paid vacation. They have some of the highest levels of happiness on the planet, and top virtually every ranking of human development. The Nordic model stands as…

Activists in Paris hold inverted portraits of Emmanuel Macron during a climate change protest in front of the Eiffel Tower last month.Photograph: Benoît Tessier/Reuters In a grandiose 1930s building on the banks of the Seine in Paris, 150 French citizens chosen at random had gathered. Ranging from…

Which personal action has the strongest impact on reducing the CO2 footprint of an average American or German? Turns out this question is surprisingly difficult to answer for most of us. And what are the next best five or ten things we should do to cut CO2? There is surprisingly little guidance out…

Recently Netflix has been testing the option of letting viewers watch prerecorded programming at 1.5x speed (a feature that already exists on YouTube) so that users can consume more content in less time. There is no word on whether they are working on the viewer’s ability to accelerate live…

neuroscience To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight By Jordana Cepelewicz September 24, 2019 A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes. Read Later We attend to only a fraction of the sensory…

As this year winds down we’ve recapped its highlights to bring you the best of 2018 in fashion, sneakers, music, movies and more. In 2018, with sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey celebrating its 50th birthday , Jun Takahashi referenced Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the space age on…

Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want…

Im Juli hat Tim Jackson in dem Aufsatz Zero Carbon Sooner—The case for an early zero carbon target for the UK begründet, warum Großbritannien wesentlich früher als—wie derzeit geplant—bis 2050 CO2-neutral werden muss, wenn es einen fairen Beitrag dazu leisten will, die globale Erhitzung bei weniger…

The warmer it gets, the more people crank up the air conditioning (AC). In fact, AC is booming in nations across the world: it’s predicted that around two thirds of the world’s households could have an air conditioner by 2050, and the demand for energy to cool buildings will triple. But unless the…

For two centuries the left was understandably relaxed about time. The arrow of time, which in nature produces complex systems out of simple ones, had replaced feudalism with capitalism, the proletariat and technological progress. In the process it produced Marxism, a secular philosophy that claimed…

Welches politische System verarbeitet die Daten der Bürger für die Bürger besser: Demokratie oder Diktatur? Der israelische Historiker Yuval Noah Harari zählt zu den Vordenkern der Digitalisierung. Jetzt warnt er vor einem Zerfall von Demokratie und Liberalismus. Viele sprechen ihm nach und stimmen…

Jul 6th 2019 W HEN BEN VAN BEURDEN was a boy in the Netherlands, one of his chores was to fill the coal scuttle. It was a hateful task—especially in the cold weather when he had to traipse out to a shed in the back garden. “I can still feel the wet, freezing cold creeping up my legs,” he told a…

Im letzten Jahr sind für mich zwei Entwicklungen wichtig geworden, die selten miteinander in Verbindung gebracht werden: das Engagement für Postwachstum, Degrowth oder Décroissance, und die IndieWeb -Bewegung. Unter IndieWeb versteht man ein offenes, von den individuellen Usern kontrolliertes und…

N icht überall, wo Transformation in Leuchtbuchstaben draufsteht, ist auch Transformation drin. Es beginnt mit irrigen Annahme, mit Agilität ließe sich die Mitarbeiterleistung wie mit Kraftfutter steigern. Fehlgeleitet von diesem Versprechen von mehr Effizienz, wird die Transformation dann aber umso…

On the Utility Fallacy May 6th, 2019 · 23 comments Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review’s website about the excesses of email culture. In an effort to destabilize the perceived necessity of our current moment of hyperactive…

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the…

David Mdzinarishvili / Reuters I own three pairs of noise-canceling headphones. Two go over my ears, enveloping them in cozy tombs of silence. One pair consists of earbuds, one of which I jam into my ear to block out the world while I use my other ear for phone interviews. Besides the…

Back in my day *adjusts glasses* designers had to take development classes and red line all of our files by hand! Now with nifty tools like Zeplin and Abstract , designers spend little to no time on handoff. Unfortunately a lot can get lost in translation. Is this button a fixed size…

Linzi Berry Mar 12, 2019 · 4 min read A crafted balance of brand essence and science Too often digital designers are required to move fast and details are forgotten. Hopefully we can all agree that handing off a text box centered within a rounded rectangle is not quality button, so what is? A…

A journalist makes a video of the Instagram logo using the new video feature at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez (AP) The only good social network is evidently toying with the idea of purging the worst thing about social media—and I, for one, couldn’t be more on…

I n August 2016 I went to New York for the first time. On the second evening, as the sun slipped behind the building across the street, I was sitting on a long couch on the top floor of an old church. All around me instruments were scattered on the floor – singing bowls, tuning forks, rainsticks,…

Is it perfect timing or merely perverse to release a documentary promoting the design philosophy “Less, but better” during the holiday season? The opening moments of Gary Hustwit’s “Rams,” about Dieter Rams, is more likely to have you revising your gift list than tossing it out. As the camera pauses…

Jenny Odell’s new book is not a self-help book. But with a title like How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (out April 9), the artist and writer understands (and doesn’t necessarily hate) why it might seem like one. “By the time you figure out that it's not [self-help], it's too late,"…

As a general rule, to build something great is not about more hours and resources thrown at a problem, but less bullshit.

A few weeks back I was standing in a room facilitating a large ideation workshop. Mid-session I found myself thinking, I am not sure if I enjoy this . Walking out of that workshop, I told myself that I entered into the design field to become a designer, not a facilitator. I felt that as a workshop…

A DoorDash delivery employee Lisa Baertlein / Reuters In March 2009, Uber was born. Over the next few years, the company became not just a disruptive, controversial transportation company, but a model for dozens of venture-funded companies. Its name became a shorthand for this new kind of business :…

‘Citizens are experiencing a “techlash” – a rude and abrupt awakening to the mammoth powers of technology companies.’Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images T o note that the “techlash” – our rude and abrupt awakening to the mammoth powers of technology companies – is gaining force by the month is…